Digital Scholarship: Digital Volunteering

Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery aims to identify, digitize, transcribe, and publish ads placed in newspapers across the United States (and beyond) by formerly enslaved people searching for family members and loved ones after emancipation. Create a free account to begin transcribing. Transcribing the ads is an important part of the process of recovering these family stories. Once an ad is fully transcribed—and verified and published by the Last Seen team—all of the information in it can be discovered via keyword search.

Launched in July 2013, the Smithsonian Transcription Center seeks to engage the public in making our collections more accessible. Citizen scholars are invited to transcribe historic documents including diaries and working papers of prominent Americans and records associated with the Smithsonian's vast scientific collections. Transcription makes these important materials more accessible to researchers around the world, as well as the general public.

We are a community of Wikipedia editors (students, faculty, and staff) on WPI campus working to improve its content. We are joining the existing efforts to fight Wikipedia's gender gap by improving, creating, and translating pages for people from underrepresented and marginalized identities. We welcome all interested parties: from first-time editors to experienced Wikipedians. We edit in several languages including English, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, and more! We can help anyone get started with editing Wikipedia

With the help of Zooniverse volunteers, researchers can analyze their information more quickly and accurately than would otherwise be possible, saving time and resources, advancing the ability of computers to do the same tasks, and leading to faster progress and understanding of the world, getting to exciting results more quickly. Projects range from assisting scientists with counting penguins to transcribing the pioneering work of women astronomers.